The Economy is a Farce: Gold & Silver Aren’t – Kerry Lutz Interview

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Kerry Lutz Interview Transcript

Dan: Greetings, and thank you for joining us at futuremoneytrends.com. I’m here with Kerry Lutz. He’s the host and founder of the Financial Survival Network, where it’s all about what’s next. He’s interviewed everyone from Jason Hartman, Rick Rule, John Robino, Jim Rogers. A lot of great information.

The cool thing, it’s a very social network‑friendly. If you want to listen to him on iTunes, if you’re a Facebook person or a YouTube person, it’s all there. Or you can just go to the website, the financialsurvivalnetwork.com.

Kerry, thanks for joining us.

Kerry Lutz: I really appreciate you having me on there, Dan. It’s a pleasure.

Dan: Kerry, we first met in person recently at the Liberty Symposium, the second one. The first one was in Dallas, the second one was in Vegas. It was an amazing group of people.

I really wanted to have you on the show today to talk about thriving in the new economy. A lot of people get so stuck on the prepping part, which is important and prudent, but we forget about the, “Hey, we still need to live and thrive.”

You have an amazing background, where you were an attorney, a serial entrepreneur. Here you just went all in on helping prep and prepare people for the new economy.

I want to start off with, as far as businesses right now or entrepreneurship, any advice you have that you tell people. Like, “OK, you got your gold, you got your food, now maybe you should consider doing a business, or doing something.” How would somebody even get into doing something like that if they were currently working, or unemployed?

Kerry: The key is find something that you love doing, that you’ve always wanted to do. Whether it’s real estate related, or whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. If it’s knitting, I’ve talked to people who are really into knitting.

If you have an expertise, if you have a love of something, a knowledge, and you really work hard on it…I heard this from Jim Rogers. The guy is a billionaire, for crying out loud. He said, “Just follow your love, follow your expertise.”

Who was it? Somebody at Casey Research told me this, David [inaudible 02:21], said, “Take your expertise, spend two to four hours a day for six months working on it, learn everything that you possibly can, connect with people, network with people,” which the Internet makes it easier than ever to do, “set up a website, set up a blog, whatever. Within a year, people will actually pay you for that knowledge.”

My goal is never to get paid for their knowledge. There are a lot of people out there who know a heck of a lot more than me, and my goal is to bring them to you, and bring their knowledge to you. Somebody like you, Dan, knows more about this stuff than I do, in my opinion. Bring your knowledge to people, get advertisers, sponsor the show, and help the public that way.

There are so many different ways, so many different models, to make money in this Internet world. The opportunities have never been greater, as traditional business changes, a lot of it dies, brick and mortar, retail, that type of thing dies. The Internet opens up opportunities that you’d never believed were going to exist before, that were never here. It’s miraculous.

Dan: Looking back, with the way business was 20 or 30 years ago, and now how it is today, you’ve been an entrepreneur your whole life, have the floodgates been opened? I’m seeing people, this has been going on for years, but now people successfully self‑publishing books. Has the floodgates opened for anybody who wants to…is the Internet the Wild West for entrepreneurs, still?

Kerry: Oh, yeah. It’s not like you don’t have to work. You’ve got to do more work than ever, but your work pays off more than it ever has before. The opportunities, it’s just amazing. You don’t have to necessarily give up your day job to do it. If you have this love, and you have this passion for doing it, the rest will come. That’s what’s amazing about it, Dan. It’s just out there.

If you like seashells, if you like wooden boats…a guy I heard of, he had a passion for wooden boats, and that’s all he devoted himself to, was wooden boats. He’s got a blog out there, a website, and a podcast about wooden boats. I have no interest in them, but evidently there are 20 or 30,000 people in the country, and even more in the world, and that’s it. The barriers, it’s no longer what’s going on in the US, it’s what’s going on in the world.

I have a mastermind group of Internet broadcasters. There are four of us. One guy’s in Calgary, one guy’s in London, and the other guy’s in Paris. We get together weekly to talk about how we can improve what we’re doing, and how we can help each other improve. You could never do that before.

Dan: One of my best friends today is from Israel. He was a Future Money Trends subscriber, and he just reached out to me. He’s like, “Hey, I’m going to come to California. Let’s meet.” We met in Carlsbad, and spent a week. Since then we’ve done a few more vacations, but it is amazing, our ability to access people.

On the economic front, yesterday we had some news come out, the GDP numbers contracted about 2.9 percent. Even the manipulated numbers are showing that the US recession is looming. What is your mood, and feeling, of this whole thing right now?

I know the numbers are manipulated, we know things are bad, but when I listen to your interviews, I’ll listen with Martin Armstrong or somebody, and I’m like, “Man, things are getting really bad, fast.”

Then I’ll listen to you talk to Tom Dyson, and Jason Hartman, and I’m like, “Maybe things aren’t that bad.” What are you thinking? You talk to so many people, and of course you’ve looked at this stuff. Are you thinking we’re getting ready to go into something severe here, or are we going to just keep chugging along for another 10 years?

Kerry: We’ve been in the depression since at least 2008, and arguably started going into it 2006, 2007. I’m going to throw some housing numbers at you, because everything the government’s been telling you, recovery this, “green shoots,” lies. I’m going to shoot some numbers at you, and you’ll understand why.

We all agree that housing is essential to US economy. For better, for worse, the economy’s shifted to housing centricity. We have an expanding population, therefore you need more abodes. Household formation is down.

March 2007, new home construction units, 858,000. March 2014, new home construction is about 358,000, or 354,000. Does that sound like a recovery to you?

Dan: No, it doesn’t. That’s much lower, it’s half.

Kerry: A couple more numbers. I don’t like throwing out a lot of numbers in radio interviews. I can go numbers, I can go charts with the best of them, but radio listeners generally like information in verbal form, not numbers, so we’ll keep the numbers brief.

December 2006, existing home sales, 6.48 million, that’s the annual rate. December 2013, 4.9 million. That’s with trillions of dollars, or hundreds of billions of dollars backstopped by the federal government, with literally no private mortgage money in the system at all. I’m talking six‑and‑a‑half million, as opposed to just under five million units. Does that sound like a recovery?

Dan: No, it’s pretty ugly. I look at the same numbers as you’re probably looking at, and I get it in my real, actual life. Both my neighbors on each side of me are foreclosed, and they both foreclosed in early 2013. One house is vacant, no one’s ever knocked on the door, the bank’s never done anything with the property, just sitting there. The other person has been squatting in it for about 14 months, 15 months.

Then I just sold my house, as we had briefly spoke prior to the interview starting. The buyer is an FHA buyer, and then their down payment is coming with…they call it a “Silent second” from California. California is fronting the down payment in the form of a second mortgage. However, they forgive the mortgage after the guy’s lived there for 20 years, or something.

He’s 100 percent backed, and it’s all government. It really is scary when you think about housing and the importance of it. So much is centered around housing, and it’s like a zombie.

Kerry: We’ve never been out of the depression, this is the point. If you go back to the Great Depression, which started in ’29 and arguably lasted until the beginning of World War II, but really lasted to the end of World War II, because consumer production was nonexistent during the War. People voluntarily forswore consumer consumption during the World War because it was a potentially existential event. You see that these depressions go on for many years.

I tend to subscribe to the cycle people, Charles [inaudible 10:59]and Martin Armstrong, that basically this will persist until at least 2020, and the debt will have to be wrung out of the system. There’s really no choice in the matter, here. There isn’t.

Dan: I know you lean on the inflationary side. Do you consider deflation a threat?

Kerry: Yeah. It could work both ways, and nobody knows how this will go, and it’s scary. There’s no way to know how these things will unfold. The dollar is under attack, and you just don’t know how it’s going to go, Dan. Nobody can predict these things. There’s just so much happening, you just can’t tell.

Dan: I thought I could predict it, and then I was wrong every year after 2008. [laughs]

Kerry: Join the club. You’re no different than any of us. You’ve got all this government money, and they’re determined not to let the Great Depression replay itself, but it’s real hard not to. Then you’ve got China determined not to let it happen. You’ve got all these central banks that think that they can control reality, and they can control economies, but then you’ve got the cycle, and the cycle is supreme.

I just don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do think that gold and silver will head higher, and probably are the safe haven investments of this generation.

Dan: What about stocks or real estate, and maybe under‑valued markets? Do you advocate any type of that? Once you have your gold and silver stash, and your other hard‑asset investments, do you suggest stocks?

Kerry: Yeah, there are now going to be favorable investments. Mining stocks, for sure, there’s a lot to be said for them. It’s just a question of what happens next. Wars and political instability feed into precious metals, and it’s just a question of where we go to from here. I’m bullish on the metals.

Dan: Me too.

Thriving on the new economy, your show’s a great example, and now you’ve started the Liberty Symposium with Robert Ian. You guys have done Dallas, you’ve done Vegas. Will there be a third?

Kerry: Oh yeah, there’ll be a third. In the meantime, you can go over to libertymastermind.us. Check out what we’ve done. The videos are available, the one where you spoke as well. I highly recommend them. I think you’ll really get a lot out of them. We have such a great time doing them, and the response from the attendees was beyond anything that you could have ever expected, right?

Dan: I totally agree. Everybody had such a great time, and you’re just there with a bunch of like‑minded individuals. Yes, there were speakers, there were 15 speakers, however there was so much conversation going on during the breaks, before, after. It really was this big mastermind group. It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to.

I don’t know where the next one’s going to be, but it’ll give me a good reason to go on a short vacation here pretty quick, hopefully. When will the next one be?

Kerry: Probably in three to six months. We’re still working on the logistics of it, and can’t say the venue yet, but we like to vary them in different parts of the country, and think you will enjoy it. That’s the main thing.

Dan: Wayne Allyn Root spoke the night before…I had never heard of this man, but he’s a gifted speaker. I could have listened to him speak the whole day, the next day. He was one of the best keynotes I’ve ever heard.

I’ve been to a lot of these conferences and stuff, even KC Summit and stuff like that, where they bring in these high‑paid speakers where they pay them 30 grand, or whatever. Wayne Allyn Root was seriously in the top two that I’ve ever heard. Where did you find this guy?

Kerry: I’m always looking for new guests. I have regular guests on the show. I have a core dozen, or two dozen, of which you’re going to have to become one shortly here, Dan. I’ve been meaning to reach out to you, but we’ll catch up with you. I know you’re busy. But I’ve got this core.

Somehow, he’s from West Chester County in New York, where I lived for two decades, and we just hit it off. I just connected with him. I had been finding him on Fox, a lot of blogs his work was coming up on, and he’s more political than I like to get. I’m really more into the economics of the thing. The politics, to me, are driven by the economics.

I’m just not into ideology. It really does nothing for me at this point in my life.

Putting all that aside, he’s a bright guy, he’s got a real interesting life story. His father was a butcher, and he went out to Vegas, became an odds‑maker, and he was in Columbia at the same time as Obama, and he had these professors, the same ones that shaped Obama’s philosophy. We just really hit it off.

I said, “We’re doing this thing in Vegas this time,” and he said, “You’ve got to let me come.” I said, “Of course,” who else would we have? Fascinating guy. He was a libertarian vice‑presidential candidate a few elections ago so he’s really in tune with a lot of our thinking, and one thing led to the other. It was just great.

Dan: Yeah, he was great. I hope he’s at the next one. He was just amazing. He was, without a doubt, the best speaker there. Kerry, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us about thriving in the current and the coming economy.

If people would like to reach out to you, I assume they just go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com, correct?

Kerry: That’s it, or they can reach me at khl@kerrylutz.com, and we answer all emails.

Dan: I appreciate your time, and this will be posted on YouTube, as well as futuremoneytrends.com. We’re going to get into iTunes pretty soon, and SoundCloud and all that stuff. I was inspired by you when I spoke to you there. You were talking to me about being on all these different social media outlets for people to find your work.

So looking forward to joining you on iTunes, because that’s actually where I listen to you, is on iTunes.